Call for Poetry Reviews by Writers Aged 13 and Younger

Emma Wood, the new Stone Soup editor, is a poet. The September issue will be her debut issue, and it will also be our first themed one. September, also our first monthly issue, will be Stone Soup’s first dedicated to poetry. Emma has several interesting ideas for the issue that I think will help all of us, me included, get deeper into poetry. An example of one her ideas is to include poetry reviews. We are familiar with book reviews. Emma wants to publish reviews of individual poems. Quite a challenge! Emma has asked me to post the following in today’s Saturday Newsletter.

From Emma:

Do you have a favorite poem? We are looking for reviews of single poems to go in our September poetry issue. (When I was young, I just loved “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll!)

Guidelines: Reviews should be between 300-600 words. The best ones will explore aspects of the poem—what is about? Are there images in it? Is there rhyme? Does it tell a story? Are there any unusual words, or any interesting punctuation or spacing? What feeling does it leave you with? Explain why you like it, perhaps connecting it to an idea or experience you have had, or maybe even another book or poem you’ve read.

Poetry reviews can be submitted to the “Reviews” section of Submittable.

Social Media and Younger Writers’ Writing

A confession. Social networking is not our strong suit. Our Twitter and Facebook pages have never really gone anywhere. At various times we have tried more frequent postings, but I think we just don’t know what our potential readers want to read in that format, our how, where, and when to post it.

We need help. What education and literary oriented Twitter feeds do you follow? Is there a group or business whose Facebook page you think is particularly effective? What kind of information about children, children’s creativity, or whatever else do you think we should tweet or post?

We have also just started an Instagram account.

If any of you reading this are good at social media, perhaps even do this for a living, would you get in touch with me? You can just reply to this email. Please look at our Twitter feed, our pictures on Instagram. and our Facebook page and then let me know what kind of information you’d like to see there. And, the all important, can you help us by actually tweeting and posting and/or help us fashion a sensible program?

The story this week, Mexican Song, is by a ten-year-old. I’d like to clarify that Stone Soup is open to any writer age 13 and under. In Stone Soup’s early years we published more work by very young writers than we do today. Very young writers sometimes express themselves differently. As they do not have the technical skills to write in standard English they make up grammar and expressions as they go along. This can be interesting. One hundred years ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, artists were pushing boundaries in writing, painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography — you name it. There is a way in which very young writers are always pushing boundaries. I just want to be clear that if you have a younger sibling in the house who writes or tells stories that are kind of fantastic, that we’d like to read them. Work that has something to say and says it in an unusual way is always of interest to us here at Stone Soup.

Until Next Week

William

Calling All Teachers!

Lots of elementary and middle schools use Stone Soup as a teaching aid or to motivate their pupils to create. You can order for your school single use and site license subscriptions, either directly from us or from any of the magazine agencies your district orders from (such as EBSCO or W.T. Cox). If you would like a trial site license then please sign up for a trial on our website.The site licenses can be based on email or IP address so students can have access to the website at home as well as in the classroom or school library.

From Stone Soup
May/June 2012

By Kimberly Vance, 10
Illustrated by Frances Burnett-Stuart, 11

Natalie Dean grabbed her violin’s bow and began rosining it feverishly. The International Mariachi Conference was tomorrow. It was the biggest performance of the whole year. And she had to solo, on a microphone in front of thousands of people. You can do this, she thought. Her song, “Sabor a Mi” (Savor me), ran through her head like a CD that played one song a million times, over and over…

Miserable questions chased after the lyrics. Why did my school have a mariachi? Not—I don’t know—orchestra, or band or something? Like a normal school? And why on earth did my innocent five-year-old self join? Why didn’t I see this coming? And so on and so on. . . . .

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